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Sep 04, 2018 Frontperson By Christopher Roberts

Frontperson is a new duo that features Kathryn Calder of The New Pornographers (and also a solo artist and formerly of Immaculate Machine) and Mark Andrew Hamilton (who has released six albums as Woodpigeon). They are releasing their debut album, Frontrunner, on September 21 via Calder’s own label, Oscar St. Previously they shared a video for its first single, “Tick - Tock (Frontrunner)” (which was one of our Songs of the Week). Now they have shared another song from the album, “Young Love,” via a video for it. Lorenz Tröbinger directed the video, which features him and his boyfriend around the time they mutually decided to end their relationship, as Tröbinger was moving. Watch it below.

Calder had this to say about the song in a press release: “‘Young Love’ was one of the last things we finished. It was kind of tricky to get right because it is a delicate song. Lyrically, I was trying to capture the feeling of meeting someone and those first days when everything is kind of unsettled but yet you also know it’s the right thing. I remember the final glue to the song - when it felt like we had figured it out - was when Mark and I played our guitars together into one microphone, inspired by an early Leonard Cohen kind of sound. There was something kind of lo-fi about playing the song that way that really worked.”

Tröbinger had this to say about the video in the press release: “Before I even listened to ‘Young Love’ I had this thought in my head about how songs are often so very personal, sometimes specific to the musician’s life and past and how at the same time music videos usually aren’t. At least not in the same way as songs are as they don’t usually reflect on the filmmaker’s life as a song might reflect on the musician’s. So it was clear to me that the film I wanted to make in response to Mark’s and Kathryn’s music would come from such a personal place. The film is about me and my boyfriend James in London and our relationship that we decided to end when I left the city. About the sadness that came with knowing that the other person would soon be far away (we shot the video a week before I left) but at the same time about the beauty of making the most of the time we had together and separating on the best of terms - knowing that we would always have a very special friend in the other one. I feel that this kind of separation, when life is taking you in different directions, is somehow more typical for the first couple of relationships in a person’s life, typical of young love. If we had been ten years older, perhaps we would have decided differently, who knows, but for now, it was the right decision. The film is a document of and a tribute to the year that we got to spend together and to the love between us - love that hasn’t ended but that is going to take on a different shape now.”

Rob Leickner and Ryan Sudds directed the previous “Tick - Tock (Frontrunner)” video, which featured various track & field events, sometimes running backwards, and was filmed at the 2018 Langley Pacific Invitational and the 2018 BC Masters Track & Field Championships. The album cover also features a track & field event and is a photograph that actually inspired the album title. Hamilton explains in a press release: “About 20 years ago, a photographer friend of mine named Ambrose Fan gave me this incredible picture of a young girl with her fists clenched, getting ready to run a race at a track meet. I’ve lived in a lot of places since then, and this photo has always come with me. When we started recording at the National Music Centre - basically one of the world’s best keyboard museums where we had pretty much free reign over their incredible collections of synths and such - I put the photo on the recording console, and it stayed there for two weeks guiding the making of our record. Whenever someone would ask what sound we were going for, I’d just point at that picture.”

Calder adds: “The photograph is now our record cover, it was the inspiration for our album name, and it’s still guiding this record, because we decided to use it as inspiration for the video for our first song, ‘Tick-Tock (Frontrunner).’”

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